Since the dawn of the information age, scholars have debated the viability of regulating cyberspace. Early on, Professor Lawrence Lessig suggested that “code is law” online. Lessig and others also examined the respective regulatory functions of laws, code, market forces, and social norms. In recent years, with the rise of Web 2.0 interactive technologies, norms have taken center-stage as a regulatory modality online. The advantages of norms are that they can develop quickly by the communities that seek to enforce them, and they are not bound by geography. However, to date there has been scant literature dealing in any detail with specific online norms, and comparing them with other forms of regulation. This article reverses that trend by presenting a detailed case study of one developing norm in the blogosphere – the norm against “hijacking” a comment thread in a blog by hyperlinking, and thereby redirecting readers, to another blog. Using this case study, the article draws some conclusions about the relative advantages and disadvantages of norms as regulators. In particular, the author concludes that too much weight is often placed on vague and opaque norms in online interactions. It advocates future emphasis on more well developed and clearly expressed norms.

The article constitutes one important contribution to the ongoing scholarly discussion about interactions and coexistence of legal rules and social norms online. It both lays out some fundamental theoretical considerations and illustrates the complexity through an interesting example. Liptons production regarding cyberlaw and cybernorms in this article and elsewhere is well worth studying.

In late September I spent two days representing Lund University at a U21 workshop in Edinburgh. We were a mix of 60 or so computer scientists, biologists and social scientists from all over the world, lumped together under the theme “Big Data at the heart of 21st Century research”. Much of my scientific curiosity about […]

LUii’s Stefan Larsson has done an overview on the relevance of digitalisation for the consumer interest, published by the Swedish Consumer Agency last week, as part of their long term strategy focusing the role of digitalisation. Larsson’s study focuses largely on data-mining practices and the management of personal and consumer-related data and problematises these practices […]